I’ve been loath to write about what’s happening with Confederate statues, but a few sleepless nights cured my diffidence. As an architectural historian who works on memorials and has dabbled in the history of historic preservation, I’ve vacillated over the years between a Ruskinian position (“let it moulder”) and a Rieglian position, trying to establish some basis, however culturally relative, for how we value parts of the built environment.

My first thought on the matter at hand is that there have been waves of iconoclasm since memorials and statues first became fixtures in the built environment. While the present phenomenon is part of a modern reaction to what are essentially political interventions in the built environment, Romans regularly cleared out the statues that cluttered the Forum. It was a form of political erasure, a fine art for any successful autocrat. France experienced moments of “statuophobia” tagged to the waves of revolutions that swept through that country in the 19th century. More recently, statues came down after the fall of the Soviet Union and its former puppet states, Saddam statues fell in Iraq, and across the world reactionaries have used iconoclasm as a form of violence manqué, often alongside actual violence. This sort of erasure has been a tool of the left and the right; iconoclasm is not a politically fixed act.

But it is erasure and this is a point that we need to explore a bit more vigorously. What are these statues saying and should we be silencing it or responding to it? I’m not totally sure I know the answer to that question.

There is, luckily, a history of contest in the south over Civil War and civil rights statues, one explored in a recent book by Dell Upton: What Can and Can’t Be Said. The title gets right to the heart of it. We are witnessing a rupture in the basic conception of what can and can’t be said publicly.

White nationalists, emboldened by the present regime, feel empowered to speak and are using monuments to do so. This is not a new use for these monuments, but the situation is amplified, acute, raw. These monuments are linguistically flexible. They can be quietly beautiful one moment, a seemingly harmless piece of civic adornment—and many were erected, we have forgotten, during the reign of the City Beautiful—and harnessed for evil in another. People have rushed in to counter the darkness unleashed in places like Charlottesville verbally, bodily, and violently. The violence has a larger context, of course, but some of it may issue from the fact that these statues are bold: tall, dignified, larger than life, often aesthetically powerful, and laden with layers of dark history. Going back to Upton’s title, what words can possibly counter that! Fists, lassoes, physical force of some sort seems to be the answer for many people. Where words fail to win the day, the statue comes down.

But should it? It is, I suppose, not enough to argue that these statues are artistically significant. Beautiful things get destroyed routinely. We may rue their passing, but preservation often has a mightily precious view of artistic and age value.

Perhaps there is some verbal or cultural equivalent to a martial arts move that could turn the power of these statues against them. Can they be lampooned, subtitled or otherwise diffused by further intervention? At the moment, I think not, at least not now. If Americans were capable of meaningful, civil dialogue, the white nationalists would not be marching and Antifa would not be storming the marches. But perhaps these statues have a role to play down the road, didactically, politically, aesthetically. I was astonished to learn that there has been for about 20 years a return to erecting Stalin statues in the former Soviet lands.

Serious dialogue begins with empathy. Perhaps we might begin that dialogue with a considered act of empathy toward these statues. They are prisoners of war, in effect, and deserve that consideration.

Cinema can be useful for landscape architects and other designers of the built environment. Over the course of the Spring semester, Professor Chip Sullivan and I have been exploring this proposition. We have delved into the body of previous theory on the intersection between architectural design and the art of filmmaking. We have also enthusiastically worked our way through a list of “Landscape Films”, where landscapes and urban places take on more of a central role than just the setting for a story to take place; films that we believe are pertinent to the design and understanding of cultural landscape. This research resulted in a series of provoking conversations about film and landscape, ranging from the particularities of set design to the landscape philosophies of certain filmmakers and their works. These weekly conversations provided a basis for further writings and drawings on the topic, and a new lens from which to approach our daily landscape design practice.

So, what exactly is so compelling about the art of cinema, and how can it influence environmental designers? The list is long, and we have only begun to scrape the surface. On a practical level, cinema can function as an important research tool for designers to study the histories, existing conditions, and cultural perceptions associated with a site. Moving image can also function as a form of representation that can help to express the more ephemeral qualities of site design like light, sound, movement, impermanence, and other spatial qualities that are not as effectively covered in the toolkit in use by designers today.

The history of motion picture is filled with examples of landscapes that are specifically designed and created for film, for example the artful, modernist garden of Villa Arpel in Jacque Tati’s Mon Oncle (1967) or the landscape that is used as a production camp and staging area to drag a 320-ton steamship over a mountain in the middle of the Amazonian rainforest (Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog, 1982). Chip maintains that many of these filmic landscapes are more successful than those designed by architects, city planners, and landscape architects. The apparent success and popularity of these filmic landscapes provoked our curiosity about the process of filmmakers, and we found that it is actually very similar to that that of the Landscape Architect; there are many lessons to be learned from a filmmaker’s approach to research, concept development, representation, storytelling, and much more. One shared interest of ours is the potential of dreams in landscape design, and we looked into the process by which filmmakers have long been able to tap into this wellspring of creativity, excelling in the translation and testing of their dreams manifested in celluloid dreamscapes. Idiosyncratic as this example may be, the synergies between the two disciplines are plentiful and can provide new insights for the development of our discipline.

Many of these topics are considered and written about more extensively in a blog that we kept over the semester, Celluloid Landscape. We hope to keep posting on this page, and will publish a selection of the research (both writings and illustrations) in a pamphlet this summer. The ARC Fellowship has provided us with the opportunity to build on the interests and research we’ve developed individually over the years, but this time in a collaborative academic setting that has allowed for critical dialogue and a more effective process for shaping ideas. The research we’ve pursued has been invaluable to our own practice, and we hope that this interdisciplinary investigation can help to stimulate new ways for those in the architectural disciplines to perceive and design the world we inhabit.

--

Chip Sullivan is a Professor, Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, author and artist who teaches in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning. This year he was awarded the American Society of Landscape Architects Jot Carpenter Teaching Medal, the ASLA’s highest honor for education. His latest graphic novel “Cartooning the Landscape” was recently published by the University of Virginia Press.

Gene Stroman is a Graduate student in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning. With a previous degree and professional background in Urban Planning, he is especially interested in cities and the way in which places accrue meaning and cultural value over time. Gene is currently serving as the managing director for Ground Up, the Department of Landscape Architecture’s student-run journal.

The latest Global Urban Humanities Brown Bag lecture on cities featured urban geographer Jason Luger, lecturer in the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning. Luger’s talk explored the tensions between art activism within the authoritarian confines of Singapore.

Luger explained that organization and mobilization around an annual firing of two remaining “dragon kilns” provides a metaphor for the underlying power of community efforts toward social change. The annual 3-day “Awaken the Dragon” festival involves thousands of local participants in making ceramics that fill kilns measuring over 88 feet in length.

While Singapore’s government supports the arts as a nation-building strategy, the process of art-making often involves input from diverse stakeholders. Art-making provides a platform for national discourse on a wide range of pressing social issues from censorship of theater to LGBTQ rights.

“Art-making–and the artistic encounter–is one way that critical voices can emerge through the nooks and crannies of the authoritarian structure,” said Luger.

Luger’s research was conducted in 2012-2015 and included interviews with artists, activists, and state officials. He is currently co-editing a book entitled Art and the City: Critical Artscapes / Resilient Artists (Routledge, 2017).

The Constitution of the People’s Republic of China promises women equal rights. But in reality, many women have to petition for years to secure equal legal rights to their village lands. Their dogged persistence is a striking example of the way quiet, long-term activism can bring about changes to people’s “right to the city,” said Lanchih Po at a recent talk sponsored by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative at UC Berkeley.

“Their activism is not photogenic,” said Po, an associate adjunct professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley, who described women who singly or in groups of two or three show up at village offices without banners or fanfare month after month, or bring lawsuits that can stretch on for decades. “They are considered a headache by local officials…they are persistent for years and years. They just don’t go away. You should see the faces of the officials when the women show up—it’s like they’ve seen a ghost.”

Po studied a town where a woman named Hui protested at the village office three to four times a week for more than ten years. “I’m so angry - I have difficulty breathing…I can’t stand how they look down on women,” Hui said.

For several decades, Po has been conducting research on villages in southern China’s Pearl River Delta, focusing on the activism of women seeking their share of rights to communally-owned rural land. In the fast-urbanizing, densely populated area around Guangzhou and Dongguan, just up the Pearl River from Hong Kong, these citified “rural” lands often generate significant income when used as sites for factories or real estate development.

The activism of women takes place in the jurisdictions known as “villages,” which have far more autonomy from the central government in China than “cities” do–even when the villages are surrounded by metropolitan sprawl and physically look quite urban. There is an ongoing battle for power between these islands of village government and the central government.

The villages jealously guard their right to self-determination, including the right to limit the number of villagers who are named as members. By limiting who counts as a citizen of the village, the more-or-less democratically elected village leaders maintain the value of each citizen’s share of the communal land and the revenue it generates.

Excluding village women who marry men from outside the jurisdiction is a key strategy for reducing the dilution of shares. But in recent decades, these “waijianü” or “out-married women” have been lobbying for their share of the villages where they or their ancestors were born. When the village claims women are no longer citizens of the village because of divorce, widowhood, or “outmarriage,” the women find they are counted as aliens in their native place.

So they petition higher levels of government for protection, much as African Americans in the American South looked to the Federal government to protect their rights against discrimination by local authorities. Still, the central government struggles to enforce national laws.

“In China there is no shortage of beautiful laws, whether environmental or relating to people’s rights, but the problem is always implementation,” says Po.

Po says the protesting women in the villages are asserting their rights in a way that is rare in China—by citing the Constitution. “They are asserting their right to the city and their right to change the urbanization process not only through issues of resource distribution but by demanding acknowledgment of their membership in the community.” These issues are not unique to China, said Po, noting that this kind of “politics of recognition” (following Charles Taylor) does not solely have to do with economic benefit, but also the right to political visibility.

On the one hand, urban village jurisdictions in China represent important zones of resistance to central state control where unique urban physical form and social relations flourish. On the other hand, they are sometimes bastions of discriminatory local customs. When local elected officials deny the citizenship of people in their midst and more distant unelected state officials seek to force that recognition, the picture of democracy and the right to the city becomes very complicated, indeed.

You can see Po’s research on other aspects of Chinese urban villages here:

Environmental design starts with the body as well as the site. In the course Cities and Bodies, taught by Global Urban Humanities Project Director Susan Moffat, students from a variety of disciplines are exploring the physical dimensions of urban form and experience. On September 27, 2016, choreographer Erika Chong Shuch and urban designer Ghigo di Tommaso led the class in exercises designed to sharpen awareness of how we use our senses to understand space and place. They also discussed their cross-disciplinary course Public Space: Placemaking and Performance.

During the presentation, Chong Shuch said she was a performer who likes to make people feel uncomfortable. She described Di Tommaso as a urban designer who, by contrast, seeks to make people feel comfortable. Their presentation was focused on exploring and challenging our own feelings of comfort and discomfort in space.

Chong Shuch and Di Tommaso began the session with a series of exercises designed to test our feeling of comfort in a group of people. Once we we had arranged ourselves comfortably on chairs in a circle, Chong Shuch instructed us to quickly move to something that was physically uncomfortable. Some placed chairs on their heads, carried many bags at once, or hugged a trash can while standing on a table. While unpacking the feeling of discomfort, people explained they felt “unfocused” and “antagonistic.” Chong Shuch then asked for everyone to remain in their uncomfortable position while trying their best to make themselves somehow comfortable. One person explained that she made herself comfortable by “becoming internal.” Another participant said that, to the contrary, sharing a gaze with another uncomfortable person was comforting to them.

We moved on to exploring social discomfort. For most, social discomfort involved touching or looking at a stranger in a way more intimate than usual. Participants leaned on someone they didn’t know, squatted above someone lying down, and moved much closer together. One participant explained that as her body started working together with another body, she began to feel more socially comfortable than she initially had.

In the next exercise we began by walking aimlessly around in a sea of people attempting to make meaningful eye contact. Chong Shuch instructed us to stop and make eye contact with one person with whom we would now be paired. The exercise entailed one partner being blindfolded and the other leading the blindfolded. Throughout the entire exercise we were not allowed to speak to each other and were allowed only to guide our partners using touch. I was blindfolded first and my partner slowly began to lead me around the room, out into the hall, and into an adjacent room. As I gained trust in my partner we began to move more quickly. I touched the materials of the wall and room around me with my hands, and eventually I was led to sit down.

We then switched places and I led my blindfolded partner around the room, feeling the walls and furniture, and finally to a seated position. The exercise had scripted moments in which Chong Shuch interjected and gave directions to the seeing partner. It also allowed for unscripted moments in which the partners were allowed to explore their own interpretation of the instructions.The exercise concluded with 2-minute free writes on the topics of protection, comfort, and delight. Di Tommaso and Chong Shuch explained that successful public spaces need to provide these elements.

Di Tommaso and Chong Shuch then described a semester-long course in which they had employed exercises like this. Through team and individual experiments the students in that class created a provisional, working definition of the term “public space,” drafted and endlessly revised on a crowdsourced online Google Doc that was itself an experimental object.

Throughout the session, although some of the exercises were uncomfortable to perform with a stranger at first, my feeling of comfort evolved. By the end of the exercises it no longer felt awkward to lead a blindfolded stranger across the room by holding their hand. The session ended with a general feeling of comfort.

The most important lesson I learned from this presentation was the difference between social and physical discomfort in space, topics which are very applicable to my field of architecture. The exercises made me more questioning of the experience in public space, for example, how someone uses a bench. Say the bench is unused. It could be either due to social or physical discomfort and separating the two could be of use when studying it. The physical discomfort could relate to the feeling of sitting on it while the social discomfort is that it is too close to a busy street. If a designer is to assume it’s physically uncomfortable and simply replace the bench with a new, more comfortable one, they might miss the true reason it’s unused. I will now think of and use this distinction between physical and social comfort in both my studies and future practice.

]]>Anne Jonas2016-11-02T16:38:00+00:00http://globalurbanhumanities.berkeley.edu/site/publication-no-cruising-mobile-identities-and-urban-life
http://globalurbanhumanities.berkeley.edu/site/publication-no-cruising-mobile-identities-and-urban-life#When:16:19:00ZThe first Global Urban Humanities research studio, “No Cruising: Mobile Identities and Urban Life” took place in Spring of 2014, co-taught by Margaret Crawford (Architecture) and Anne Walsh (Art Practice). With six PhD students, three MFA candidates, and one undergraduate student from a diverse set of disciplinary backgrounds, the course took on Los Angeles and the multiple themes generated by the concept of mobility (and its inverse: immobility). Over the course of the semester, students visited LA multiple times and explored the city via car, bus, light rail, walking, and running, focusing on the circulation of bodies, stories, designed forms, performance, identities, labor, opportunities, and relationships.

Out of the studio comes a new publication documenting these projects, also titled No Cruising. Student essays are accompanied by rich images of urban life, archival materials, and maps that reflect the social, political, cultural, and environmental histories that shape current experiences of movement and entrapment within the city infrastructure. These projects upend dominant myths of the city (spoiler alert: people do walk!) and disturb established spatial arrangements through performance and imagined design.

As the faculty advisors write in their introduction, “The No Cruising projects address human agency–transit activists, artists and gallerists, teenage drag queens, and Midwestern, Mexican, and Taiwanese immigrants–as well as monumental forms like the Watts towers and palm trees, and finally the expressions of invisible but potent agents such as seismic and spiritual force fields.” This beautiful publication weaves together distinct experiences across a landscape, offering readers a chance to dive into the many complex threads that make up life in this iconic city.

Students in the course:

Ying Fen Chen, Architecture PhD

Sarah Cowan, Art History, PhD

Jason Fritz, Art Practice, MFA

Megan Hoetger, Performance Studies, PhD

Kathleen Irwin, Architecture, MS

Lee Lavy, Art Practice, MFA

Fabian Leyva-Barragan, Art History, Art Practice, and German, BA

Michelle Ott, Art Practice, MFA

Sabrina Richard, Architecture, PhD

Noam Shoked, Architecture, PhD

Alec Stewart, Architecture, PhD

]]>Anne Jonas2016-10-05T16:19:00+00:00http://globalurbanhumanities.berkeley.edu/site/rue-mapp-on-outdoor-afro-and-the-nature-of-race
http://globalurbanhumanities.berkeley.edu/site/rue-mapp-on-outdoor-afro-and-the-nature-of-race#When:23:07:00ZThe stereotypical American explorer of wilderness is usually portrayed as a white male. The word “urban” is often a code word for “black.” Oakland native Rue Mapp stands stereotypes on their head. She grew up with a deep appreciation of nature developed over summers at her grandparents’ ranch in rural Lake County. She has become nationally recognized for her leadership in encouraging fellow African Americans to get outdoors. On September 13th, she came to speak to the course Cities and Bodies, taught by Global Urban Humanities Project Director Susan Moffat.

Crister Brady, a student in the class who is pursuing both and MD and a master’s degree in Public Health, describes the two-hour session:

Rue Mapp is founder of the Oakland-based national organization Outdoor Afro, “a network that celebrates and inspires African American connections and leadership in nature.” Mapp’s talk on “Black Bodies in Nature and Wilderness” illuminated our class readings and the week’s theme: “the Nature of Race.”

Our readings addressed American conceptions of race, wilderness, and the freedom to move through public and natural space. We took a look at the Jim Crow-era Negro Motorist Green Book, which served as a guide to lodging and restaurants with practical and safe resources that “assured protection for the Negro traveler.” Gillian White’s Atlantic article noted the “defensive and proactive mechanism” of the Green Book. We also read an interview with the renowned author James Baldwin that connected directly to Mapp’s work: “What one has to do as a black American is to take white history as written by whites and claim it all…”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in an essay written to his son from the book Between the World and Me, identified racism as a visceral experience for black bodies in contrast to “the dream” lived by much of white America, which enjoys access to safe public spaces under a veil of “American innocence” that accepts racism as “beyond the handiwork of men.” Similarly, William Cronon in Uncommon Ground explores the concept of an uninhabited wilderness as a human invention set aside initially for the wealthiest (white male) citizens as a form of “cultural imperialism.”

Mapp shared stories and photos from her youth in the outdoors, her high school days in Oakland, and her experience as a re-entry student juggling parenthood with the pursuit of a degree in art history at UC Berkeley. After graduation, she grew Outdoor Afro from modest beginnings as a blog into a national organization.

Two aspects of Mapp’s story that affected me most as a medical and public health student were her focus on the healing communities through the power of being in nature as a group and her focus on families and caregivers. Given the recently documented and ongoing police violence towards black communities, Mapp and Outdoor Afro have organized “healing hikes” as a way to respond and return to the healing power of nature that has brought black communities together in the US for centuries.

In a blog post after the first healing hike in 2014 following the death of Eric Garner during the course of his arrest in New York, Mapp wrote, “We recall how Harriet Tubman led our people with and through nature to help us find freedom. The March on Washington brought together thousands of all hues in a national park to demand civil rights.” I was struck both by the creativity of this approach towards violence, but also by the power of calling upon a community’s own history for strength. By stepping outside of the cities that hold violent memories and confrontations for many people of color, healing was able to occur.

Mapp pointed out that Outdoor Afro does not focus its programs only on young people of color, but specifically on families and caregivers as those who will have the most impact on consistently empowering others to be able to enjoy nature and find their place in it. This comprehensive approach seems to be unique in a non-profit environment that involves competing for funding that specifically targets certain slices of communities.

Finally, one of Mapp’s fans in the audience, author and publisher Malcolm Margolin, said that he feels Mapp embodies the concept of deep hanging out, because of how inclusive she is in her work with Outdoor Afro and the joy she brings with her. I felt that this defined Mapp’s story well.

In terms of my own medical and public health studies with people experiencing homelessness, Mapp’s approach to community engagement and empowerment reminded me of the importance of joy and shared experience. Just as Mapp has identified, I’ve seen that issues of representation in nature and other health-promoting environments are deeply intertwined with community health.

I’m reminded of the interactions between people experiencing homeless along the river in Sacramento and the lycra-clad road bikers and runners on the river trails. The nature trails are viewed as paths towards home and refuge by some, and by others as public space to be enjoyed and admired for its lack of a human footprint. Could the interaction between these two groups form a common ground for health advocacy or are they too incompatible with the dominant views of nature to allow for inhabited public space?

]]>Anne Jonas2016-10-03T23:07:00+00:00http://globalurbanhumanities.berkeley.edu/site/reawakening-the-sensory-network
http://globalurbanhumanities.berkeley.edu/site/reawakening-the-sensory-network#When:20:30:00ZOn Saturday, February 27, Ava Roy, Artistic Director of the We Players site-integrated theater group led students in a workshop at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge to learn methods of using movement and bodily awareness to investigate public spaces. For a complete description of the workshop, which was sponsored by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, and other experiments in dance and architecture, see this blogpost.

REAWAKENING THE SENSORY NETWORK

by Jason Prado, Master in Landscape Architecture candidate

My recent fascination with Lawrence Halprin's design process and the development of my studio design is what brought me to Ava Roy's workshop. In studio, I have become increasingly interested in how landscape design can not only benefit places ecologically, but also how it can create a theatrical stage for people in civic spaces to perform at all scales, from concerts and protests to the stand alone street performers. It seemed like a perfect match!

However, I was still uncertain of what to expect, as I am new to the field of making spaces and even newer to the world of performing arts. In any case, the workshop did give me a great excuse to visit Fort Point, which is an incredible site. From the beginning, I felt at ease with Ava. She did not start with lecturing us or even giving us context.

She began with awakening our senses by asking us to close our eyes for just a few minutes and allow the other senses to take hold. What do we hear in the distance? What do we hear at our feet? How does that make you feel? I almost immediately entered a calming, meditative state. It reminded me of practicing yoga, which helps to relieve the stresses of my day and ground me in my senses, which are often blurred with all the other noise of the day. The exercises continued throughout the workshop and helped with bringing the group together and bringing meaning to the place. It was an effective tool to shut out the outside world and bring yourself to be with the space and notice things that would otherwise be hidden at first glance.

That is what I found so powerful about the workshop. This kind of approach to the space allowed Ava to be successful in her production. She diligently studied the space in a manner that soon revealed to her where, when, and how to set up her performance and this led me to think, “How can I bring this to my design?”

Jason Prado at Fort Point
Image courtesy of Hien Nguyen

It is often that we find ourselves glaring at our phones, listening to our headphones, browsing social media, or performing other daily rituals that allow us to be unaware of our surroundings. And thinking in terms of design, it presents a major problem because it is very difficult to make people stop and take notice. However, the series of exercises I just underwent revealed the space in a way that I would not have captured otherwise.

Can I use these exercises in my site analysis? It seemed clear that they can be another set of tools to make sense of the current state of the site. This kind of practice can reveal the awful noise of a site but it can also shed light on the uniqueness or beauty of a site. This is where one can harness, for example, a faint pleasant noise and bring it to the surface to contribute to a more complete design.

In the past week I had the opportunity to participate in three transformative workshops—two sponsored by the Global Urban Humanities Initiative--that used dance, movement, and mindfulness to explore public space.

Teatro Campesino in Wurster Hall, the Central Valley and Mexico City 2/25/2016

In a narrow, high-sided concrete courtyard hidden in an outdoor corner of the Brutalist Wurster Hall, Kinan Valdez of Teatro Campesino asked students and faculty to growl and shout; to walk, crawl, and leap; and to engage with props such as ropes and lampshades to reconsider the uses of discarded objects. The “Theater of the Sphere” practice of Teatro Campesino grows out of the company’s roots in Cesar Chavez’ United Farmworkers Union. In the 1960s, Teatro Campesino performed and engaged with workers on flatbed trucks and in union halls, and the company continues to create innovative theater today.

Assistant Professor Angela Marino (Theater, Dance & Performance Studies) had invited Valdez to help prepare students for a research studio trip to Mexico City, where they will investigate issues of materiality, performance and power in a fast-changing megacity. During the workshop, we were struck by how our individual and collaborative motion in the confined gray courtyard transformed a prison-like space of raw concrete into an almost cozy enclave, a home for shared experiments in how bodies relate to architectural space.

In March, the students will travel to Mexico City to pursue research projects ranging from the ethnographic to the artistic, led by Marino, Assoc. Prof. C. Greig Crysler (Architecture), and Prof. Maria Moreno Carranco of the Universidad Autónoma Metoropolitana-Cuajimalpa. As with all Global Urban Humanities courses, the group is interdisciplinary and includes students from disciplines including architecture, art practice, film, geography, literature and performance studies.

Shakespeare, Sound, and Memory at Fort Point 2/27/2016

Another group of students explored a very different space two days later. The vast, windy courtyard of the Civil War-era Fort Point was the setting for a workshop led by Ava Roy, artistic director of We Players. Roy has presented large-scale, site-integrated theater including Hamlet at Alcatraz, The Odyssey at Angel Island, The Tempest at the Albany Bulb, and several different stagings of Macbeth at Fort Point. Located at the southern base of the Golden Gate bridge, the massive brick fort encloses a concrete courtyard with three stories of arched galleries that once held huge cannon pointed out at potential intruders into San Francisco Bay.

Roy asked the students to explore the space with eyes closed and open. The rumbling of cars overhead on the bridge, the wind, and the crashing waves outside made for an acoustically unsettling, even threatening environment. As students tried to distinguish softer sounds, and ones closer and farther away, they discovered aspects of the space they had not considered. Roy explained how in her stagings of Macbeth she experimented with moving the audience and actors through the galleries, the courtyard, and the roof, employing musicians as pied pipers. She served real food at an enormously long table in the banquet scene to rejuvenate the audience on their strenuous journey up and down the stone staircases—and arranged for them to find their repast interrupted by Banquo’s ghost.

Image courtesy of Hien Nguyen

Participants said they were struck by the craftsmanship and complexity of the brickwork in the vaulted galleries of the fort, by the accidents of light, and by the surprising current uses of the space. Despite the frigid and foreboding atmosphere of the Fort, on this day it was filled with professional photographers shooting smiling clients in evening attire or high-fashion maternity wear, using the steel undergirdings of the bridge and the carceral military architecture to frame family celebrations.

The architects and city planners participating in the workshop said that Roy’s instructions in ways to maintain a soft gaze, to de-privilege the sense of sight by sharpening hearing, touch, and smell, and to be mindful of bodily sensations were a useful alternative to their usual analytical tools for considering public space. Landscape Architecture student Jason Prado reflected on what he learned here.

Anna Halprin and the Tradition of Dance as Research 2/28/2016

Anna and Lawrence Halprin were pioneers in the 1960s in combining dance and environmental design to understand and build spaces both public and private. Halprin was one of the most influential American landscape architects of the last century, responsible for both Sea Ranch and Sproul Plaza, among many works. He passed away in 2009, but at age 95, his wife, choreographer Anna Halprin still teaches dance and movement at places including the iconic deck of their home in Marin County.

On Sunday, she led a workshop in the wide-open Crane Forum of the new BAM/PFA museum in downtown Berkeley in association with the Architecture of Life exhibition. While her collaborator Dohee Lee provided rhythmic sounds breathed into a microphone, (fascinating small children who happened to be passing by) Halprin worked with participants to build a “score”—a set of broad instructions for directing movement, developed in an iterative conversation among Halprin and the participants.

The giant wooden steps of the Forum and the airy spaces of the museum provided a far gentler space than either the Wurster Hall hidden courtyard or the cold massiveness of Fort Point. But like those spaces, it provided an acoustic, visual, and haptic container for people’s investigations of the relationship of their bodies to space, to other people, and to the memories embodied in architecture designed for pedagogy, surveillance, or the display of art. The experiments of the Halprins in are chronicled in a current exhibition at the California Historical Society, which documents the development of their RSVP Cycles method of creative collaboration.

The Architecture of Life is also a course taught this semester by Global Urban Humanities Initiative faculty members Prof. Shannon Jackson and Assoc. Prof. Nicholas de Monchaux, which features public lectures. As a springboard for the Chancellor's new Arts+Design Initiative, which is headed by Jackson, the exhibition and course explore interdisciplinary approaches to cities and space that dovetail with Global Urban Humanities experiments.

Movement and Bodies as Essential Tools for Design

Building on traditions like those pioneered by the Halprins, for the past several years, the Global Urban Humanities Initiative has been harnessing dance and movement as a way to investigate space and inform the design of buildings, parks, and public spaces In Spring 2015 urban designer Ghigo di Tommaso and choreographer Erika Chong Shuch taught an interdisciplinary course called Public Space: Placemaking and Performance that explored theories of public space through physical experiments including interventions such as inviting Costco shoppers to participate in listening to the concrete floors of the store or setting up cardboard “people” for passersby to engage with in downtown Berkeley.

The nature of these bodily experiments tends to be iterative and cumulative rather than conclusive. Their value will need to be measured in the ongoing work of the designers and scholars who are developing new cross-disciplinary tools for interrogating space and place.

]]>Susan Moffat2016-03-02T19:35:00+00:00http://globalurbanhumanities.berkeley.edu/site/art-politics-the-city-in-mexico-and-china-keynote-presentation
http://globalurbanhumanities.berkeley.edu/site/art-politics-the-city-in-mexico-and-china-keynote-presentation#When:21:55:00ZClick here for VIDEO of the Keynote Presentation.

The Art, Politics & the City in Mexico and China symposium took place on October 23, 2015. This wide-ranging interdisciplinary symposium examined art, commerce, politics, violence, history, and urban space on both sides of the Pacific. Creative artists and scholars explored contemporary performance, film, art, and activism in Mexico City from the Revolution to today. The event also featured an exhibition on current art and urbanism in China’s dynamic Pearl River Delta (Art+Village+City) and research on contemporary Shanghai by a team from the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative was presented in a video-based exhibit. In addition, new UC Berkeley publications and websites on participatory urbanisms (focusing on São Paulo and New Delhi) and urban pilgrimage were unveiled.

by Lyndsey Ogle

In his keynote address, “Mexico City: From Revolutionary Ruins to Global City…and Back Again,” Rubén Gallo asked the question, “What does it mean to use Havana to think about Mexico City?” With radically different first impressions of each capital, Gallo suggests that each city reflects an omnipresence of ruins. While ruins have almost become a stereotype of Havana, the official discourse of the ‘new’ Mexico City, centers on the city as a thriving metropolis, experiencing a moment of discrete economic growth, yet ruin has always defined the city’s history. In the Zócalo or main square of central Mexico City are the remains of a great temple of the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan. The Zócalo later became the site of colonial power, flanked by a 16th century church and governmental building and now stands as one of the foremost tourist destination in the city. The 1920s and 1930s were seen by many scholars as the golden age of Mexican art, with Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and experimental poetry and literature “synchronized to reflect the modern new world,” but life during that period was also framed by the everyday experience of collapse as demonstrated in photos of the destruction left behind by the Mexican Revolution—images which Gallo points out are more often associated with Havana than Mexico City. Gallo argues that though the 1920s was a moment of life in shambles, most scholars reflect on it with optimism, focusing on new building, expansion, and experimentation. In the 1950s, Mexico City entered what many believe to be its golden age of economic and political stability.

Image courtesy of Tamara Kalo

Gallo cites the construction of Mario Pani’s 1960’s housing development, Conjunto Urbano Nonoalco Tlatelolco, which was the largest in Mexico and one of the largest in the world, as an example of the new development intended to convey a “new” Mexico City. During the excavation, the ruins of what was believed to be a pre-Columbian necropolis were discovered, however, Pani refused to halt the construction of the complex, limiting future scholarship of the site. This project intended to distance the city from the image of ruins itself became a site of ruin, first in 1968 with the Tlatelolco massacre and then in 1985 when an earthquake left parts of the complex in ruins for decades. Gallo asks if ruins are a constant presence, why do most scholars not think about the city as a city of ruin? Today Havana is critiqued for turning its ruins into sites for tourism while Mexico City has used the disruption of modern construction as a way of concealing its ruins. This dialectic of exposure and concealment, problematizes “exactly what type of ruin that is being concealed?"

Image courtesy of Tamara Kalo

“Never has Mexico City been so fragile on the inside—drugs and corruption have penetrated every level of society, justice and ministries are in shambles, all systems meant to take care are in ruins.” Gallo leaves us with the question: “Havana’s ruins can be fixed but how do your rebuild trust, ethics, and respect for human rights? Where does a society begin a process of national reconstruction?”